Docear’s PDF Inspector: Extracting titles from PDF files

A while ago we released Docear with automatic metadata extraction. Several users asked us if this functionality was also available as stand-alone tool. Therefore, we decided to create a little tool which we name “Docear’s PDF Inspector”.Â Docear’s PDF Inspector extracts titles from PDF files not from the PDF’s metadata but from its full-text. More precisely, Docear’s PDF Inspector extracts the full-text of the first page of a PDF and looks for the largest text in the upper third of that page. This text is returned as title. Of course, this does not always deliver the correct title (e.g. sometimes the journal name is formatted in a larger font size than an article’s title) but in about 70% you will get the correct one. Â The main features of Docear’s PDF Inspector are

Usable asÂ stand-aloneÂ command-line application (returns a PDFs’ title on the command line)

Usable inÂ batch modeÂ (stores the extracted titles into a CSV file)

ReadsÂ all PDF versionsÂ (other tools such as SciPlore Xtract or ParsCit are using PDFBox for processing the PDFs. However, PDFBox sometimes has problems extracting text from PDFs not being 100% compliant to the PDF standard – Docear’s PDF Inspector is more tolerant)

Written entirely inÂ JAVA 1.6. Hence, Docearâ€™s PDF Inspector runs on any major operating system, including Windows, Linux, and Mac OS, without any other tools required (besides the JAVA run time environment, of course)

CompletelyÂ independentÂ of further tools – you only need Docear’s PDF Inspector, that’s it (e.g. SciPlore Xtract requires pdftohtml to be installed)

Released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) 2 or later, which means it is completely free to use and its source code can be downloaded and modified by anyone.

Please note, as a normal Docear user you don’t have to download Docear’s PDF Inspector – it is already integrated into Docear.Â We only offer Docear’s PDF Inspector as separate download for third parties who would like to use it in their own applications. In addition, Docear’s PDF Inspector has not (yet) a look-up function that complements the extracted metadata with further information from Docear’s Web Service.

Hi,with the recent Docear software in Windows 7, i am not able to use this function (i would love to use this. I tried to import metadata from pdfs from data fetched by Doccear’s digital library. Its neither extracting any title of the pdf, nor its metadata. Any suggestions ?

Could you please report this problem in our bug forum? and please explain in more detail what you are doing (which entries you are selecting in the menu) and what happens. please also report whether you are using Docear behind a proxy server or with a “normal” internet connection.